F our decades of steady growth in femaleemployment have gone a long way toward closing the job gap between women and menin the industrialized countries. One of the most striking changes in Europe andthe United States has been the rise in employment among mothers with youngchildren. Nearly 85 percent of U.S. mothers employed before childbearing nowreturn to work before their child's first birthday. Although this is anencouraging trend from the perspective of gender equality in the marketplace, itis raising a new and difficult question about arrangements in the home: Ifeveryone is working in the market, who is caring for the children?
Many parents in the industrialized countries find themselves navigatinguncertain new terrain between a society that expects women to bear the primaryresponsibility for caring in the home and a society that expects, andincreasingly requires, all adults to be at work in the market. Mothers andfathers are struggling to craft private solutions to this problem. But ratherthan resolving the question of who will care for children when everyone is on thejob, these private solutions often exacerbate gender inequality, overburden theparents, and ultimately lead to poor-quality child care.
Although such problems are not unique to the United States, they may be moreacute in this country because families have access to so little public support.The nation's policy makers and opinion leaders have been preoccupied in recentyears with the promotion of "family values." Compared with most of Europe,however, this country provides exceptionally meager help to children, theirparents, and the workers--mostly women--who care for other people's children. Anddespite the current preoccupation with getting everyone--particularly poormothers--into the work force, the United States does much less than Europeancountries to remove employment barriers for women with young children.
The Problem of Private Solutions
One private solution to child care adopted by many parents in the UnitedStates is the combining of parental caregiving and part-time employment. Becausethe parents who work reduced hours are overwhelmingly mothers--only 42 percent ofAmerican women work full-time year round--this solution exacerbates genderinequality in both the market and the caring spheres. Part-time work schedules,career interruptions, and intermittent employment relegate many women to theleast remunerative and rewarding jobs; and these employment patterns contributeto wage penalties that persist long after the children are grown. In dual-parentfamilies with children below school age, married mothers' labor-market incomeaccounts for, at most, a third of families' total labor-market income across theindustrialized countries; in the United States, it accounts for only one quarter.
Another private solution is the combining of substitute care for children andfull-time parental employment. Although this works well for some families, manyothers find themselves overburdened by the demands of the market and the home.Women in particular often work the equivalent of a double shift, combiningfull-time paid work with unpaid caregiving. In a recent article inDemography, SuzanneBianchi concludes that despite the increase in mothers' labor-market activities, their time spent with their children remained nearly constant between 1965 and 1998. Where do employed mothers get the time? The data suggest that they do less of everything else, including housework, volunteering, engaging in leisure activities, and sleeping.
More parental employment also means children spend much more time in substitutecare. Recent increases in the use of child care in the United States have beenparticularly sharp for children below age one, 44 percent of whom are now in someform of nonparental child care. The extensive reliance on substitute child careimposes a heavy financial burden, consuming as much as 35 percent of householdincome for poor working families. It also raises concerns about the quality ofcare in children's youngest and most developmentally sensitive years. Theseconcerns are particularly acute in the United States, where experts conclude thatnearly two-thirds of the mostly private nonparental child care settings provideonly fair-to-poor care.
The private-child-care solution to the work-family dilemma creates another, oftenoverlooked problem: It impoverishes a large, low-wage child care work forcedominated by women. Child care workers in the United States are among the mostpoorly paid members of the work force, averaging less than $7 per hour inearnings and usually working without employment benefits or realisticopportunities for career advancement.
While parents in the United States are left largely to their own devices, parentsin most European welfare states can count on child care and parental-leavebenefits to help them juggle work in the market and in the home. Although thesepolicies have not fully resolved the problems of gender inequality and parentaloverburdening, they provide encouraging lessons about how government can helpparents strike a balance between caring and earning.
Key to realizing greater gender equality in both the workplace and the home isrecognizing that mothers and fathers alike deserve support in their market andcaregiving roles. For a number of years, feminist scholars in Europe and theUnited States have debated the meaning of a woman-friendly welfare state. Auniversal-breadwinner perspective calls for welfare-state provisions that supportand equalize women's employment attachments--for example, by providing extensivepublic child care. An opposing caregiver-parity perspective calls for provisionsthat grant women "the right to time for care" and remunerate women for care workperformed in the home through generous maternity pay and other caregiverbenefits.
Neither perspective fully resolves the tension between work and family lifewhile promoting gender equality. Both fail to provide a satisfying vision of thewelfare state--in part because they do not address the issue of fathers ascaregivers. Women's widespread assumption of greater market responsibilities hasnot been equally matched by fathers' assumption of child care responsibilities inthe home. Although men's involvement in caregiving appears to be on the rise,Bianchi estimates that married fathers in the United States spent just 45 percentof the time their wives spent on caregiving in 1998--an increase of only 15percentage points since 1965.
A bridge between the universal-breadwinner and caregiver-parity perspectives maylie in social policies that promote what British welfare-state scholar RosemaryCrompton calls the "dual earner/dual carer" society. This is a society in whichmen and women engage symmetrically in both paid work in the labor market andcaregiving work in the home. Central to the dual earner/dual carer solution isthe recognition that both mothers and fathers should have the right and opportunity to engage in market and caregiving work without incurring poverty in terms of money or time. For families with very young children (say, younger than age three), mothers and fathers would have the right to take substantial time off from market work to care for their children, without loss of income. For families with children from age three to school age, both parents would have the right to engage in flexible and reduced-hour employment, and they would have access to affordable, high-quality substitute child care.
This solution assumes that men would re-allocate substantial portions of timefrom the labor market to the home while their children are young. Hence, asAmerican political theorist NancyFraser has suggested, "men [would] become more like women are now" in the allocation of their time.
The sweeping transformations of market and gender relations necessary to achievea gender-egalitarian dual earner/dual carer society are obviously not imminent.But the steep rise in maternal employment in recent years and the more modestrise in men's caregiving time suggest that some form of dual earner/dual carerarrangement is already the reality for many families in the industrialized world.Given this reality, what can government do to help such families now and topromote greater gender equality in the future? The United States is arguably aleader in rhetorical support for the family and for equal employmentopportunities--but it's a clear laggard in making the rhetoric meaningful. U.S.policy makers could take a lesson from the European welfare states, which financeextensive parental leaves during the earliest years of children's lives andprovide high-quality early-childhood education and care services for olderpreschool children. Increasingly, these countries also incorporate incentivesthat encourage men to assume a larger share of caregiving work in the home.
Family Leave
Although their family support programs vary substantially, nearly all of theindustrialized welfare states provide generous maternity, paternity, or otherparental leave during the first year of childhood, typically funded through somecombination of national sickness, maternity, and other social-insurance funds.The most substantial leave benefits are provided in two Scandinavian countriesthat have consolidated maternity, paternity, and other parental-leave schemes.Norwegian parents are entitled to share 52 weeks of leave with an 80 percent wagereplacement (or 42 weeks with full wage replacement) following the birth of achild, while Swedish parents can share a full year of leave with nearly full wagereplacement, followed by three additional months at a lower rate. Mostcontinental European countries provide somewhat shorter maternity leaves--usuallythree to five months--but they pay relatively high replacement rates: 80 percentto 100 percent.
Even beyond the child's first birthday, parents in some European countrieshave rights to partial leave and reduced-hour employment. In Denmark, forexample, mothers have a right to 28 weeks of maternity leave after childbirthwith high wage replacement, and fathers have a right to two weeks of paternityleave; once these leaves are exhausted, the parents can share 10 weeks ofparental leave with high wage replacement, and then each parent is entitled to 13weeks of child care leave at 80 percent of the parental-leave benefit level.Finnish parents can choose to stay on leave for up to three years while receivinga low, flat-rate benefit. And Swedish parents have the right to work as little assix hours per week, with job protection, until their children are eight yearsold.
Although generous leave policies have economic and social benefits for familieswith very young children, they can create new forms of gender inequality. Thetotal percentage of paid parental-leave days taken by fathers amounts to lessthan 10 percent across the European welfare states and less than 3 percent inmany. Because leaves are taken overwhelmingly by mothers, many women pay a pricefor their long absences from the labor market in the form of lost human capitaland career advancement.
Several of the Scandinavian countries are addressing the gender gap inparental-leave taking by creating incentives for fathers to take the leave towhich they are entitled. The most critical of these incentives is highwage-replacement rates. Because men tend to have higher wages than women, in theabsence of full wage replacement it often makes economic sense for couples todecide that the mother should withdraw from the labor market. The 80 percent to100 percent wage-replacement rates in most of the European countries reduce theeconomic disincentive for fathers to take full advantage of leave benefits.
A second important gender-equalizing policy is the granting of individual ornontransferable leave benefits to fathers as well as to mothers. In Norway andSweden, four weeks of parental leave are reserved explicitly for fathers; inDenmark fathers have a right to two weeks of paternity leave. In all threecountries, leave time reserved for the father but not taken is lost to thefamily. These "use or lose" provisions encourage parents to participate moreequally in leave-supported caregiving. The Scandinavian welfare states have takenactive steps to promote fathers' use of leave benefits. In the late 1990s, theSwedish government engaged in a public campaign to educate employers and unionsabout how fathers' parental leave can be good not just for families but for workorganizations and society. Norwegian policy expert Anne Lise Ellingsaeter reportsthat in her country government officials are now pushing fatherhood onto thepolitical agenda: "While employment for women was the main issue of policies inthe 1980s," she suggests, the 1990s brought in "the caring father, and thus thedomestication of men." The emphasis on fathers is expanding beyond theScandinavian countries as well. Italy, for example, instituted use-or-lose daysin 2000.
The European welfare states also provide instructive lessons about how to financeparental-leave benefits. Nearly all of the European leave programs are fundedthrough either social-insurance schemes or general tax revenues. None relies onmandating employers to provide wage replacement for their own employees. Thosecountries in which social-insurance funds draw heavily on employer contributionsdo not "experience-rate"--that is, adjust contributions to reflect the number ofleave takers at the firm level. These financing mechanisms reduce employerresistance by spreading the cost among employers and by supplementing employercontributions with general revenue funds. By reducing the cost to individualemployers, these mechanisms also minimize the risk that employers willdiscriminate against potential leave takers who might otherwise be seen asunusually expensive employees.
How costly are these leave schemes? Spending on maternity, paternity, andparental leave is substantial and is rising in nearly all the European welfarestates. Costs relative to population and gross domestic product (GDP) aresurprisingly modest, however. As of the middle 1990s, annual family leaveexpenditures per employed woman (in 1990 U.S. dollars) were about $900 in Swedenand Finland, and about $600 to $700 in Norway and Denmark. France spent a moremoderate $375 per employed woman. The higher-spending Scandinavian countriesinvested approximately 0.7 percent to 1.0 percent of GDP in family leave, whileFrance spent 0.35 percent.
Child Care
The European welfare states provide another critical form of support for dualearner/dual carer families and for gender equality in the form of high-quality,public early-childhood education and care. They have developed two distinctmodels. The model in the Scandinavian countries is an integrated system of childcare centers and organized family-day-care schemes serving children from birth toschool age, managed by social-welfare or educational authorities. Nearly allemployed parents have access to a place in the public child care system withlittle or no waiting time, and enrollment rates are high. In Sweden and Denmark,for example, one-third to one-half of children under age three are in some formof full-day, publicly supported care, along with 72 percent to 82 percent ofchildren between the ages of three and five.
The model developed by the continental countries of France and Belgium is atwo-phase system of child care. For younger children, full-day child care centers(creches) and some publicly supervised family-day-care schemes are provided under the authority of the social-welfare system. Beginning at age two and a half or three, children are served in full-day preprimary programs, the écoles maternelles, within the educational system. Enrollment of young children in creches is high (30 percent in Belgium and 24 percent in France); it's nearly universal in the écoles maternelles for preschool-age children.
Although a large child care sector would seem to be unambiguously positive forgender equality in employment, it can exacerbate inequality if it impoverisheswomen who work as child care providers. In the European countries, although thechild care sector is also mainly women, a large share of child care workers arepublic-sector employees. As such, they benefit from the good public-sector wagesand benefits common in Europe. Relatively high wages for child care workers aretied to high standards for the education and training of child careprofessionals, who are typically required to have three to five years ofvocational or university training. Higher educational standards have benefitsthat extend beyond the economic welfare of female child care workers. They alsoincrease the quality of care that children receive.
Like leave benefits, early-childhood education and care services in Europeancountries are financed largely by the government. Funding is provided bynational, state or regional, and local authorities, with the national sharetypically dominant in services for preschool-age children. Care for very youngchildren and, to a lesser extent, for preschool children is partially fundedthrough parental co-payments that cover an average of 15 percent to 25 percent ofcosts. Because co-payments are scaled to family income, lower-income familiestypically pay nothing and more affluent families pay no more than 10 percent to15 percent of their income.
Child care expenditures are large and growing in the European welfare statesbut--like leave expenditures--are modest in per capita terms. Total spending ondirect child care in the mid-1990s was about $2,000 per child under age 15 inSweden and Denmark; it served a large share of all children under the age ofseven and many school-aged children in after-school care. In France expenditurestotaled a little over $1,000 per child under age 15; they served nearly allthree-to-five-year-olds and about one-quarter of children under age three. Theseinvestments in early-childhood education and care constituted about 1.6 percentto 2.2 percent of GDP in Sweden and Denmark, and about 1 percent in France.
On all fronts, the United States lags behind Europe to a remarkable extent.The United States stands out as one of only a few countries in the entire worldthat fail to provide any national program of paid maternity leave. Until 1993this country lacked even job protections for women at the time of childbirth.With the passage of the Family andMedical Leave Act (FMLA), workers in firms with at least 50 employees were granted rights to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave each year for childbirth or adoption or to care for a seriously ill family member. The exclusion of small firms leaves an estimated one-half of the U.S. work force without even this rudimentary benefit. Additionally, the absence of wage replacement presents an obvious problem: The congressionally established U.S.Commission on Leave reports that 64 percent of employees who need but do not take FMLA-based leave indicate that they cannot afford the loss of wages.
Some families in the United States receive short periods of paid leave throughemployer-based disability benefits. Five states provide public TemporaryDisability Insurance (TDI) programs. Because the Pregnancy Discrimination Act applies to these programs, new mothers have a right to short periods of paid leave if they have either private or public disability benefits. As of the early 1990s, however, only an estimated one-quarter of U.S. working women had coverage under these laws. The Institute for Women's PolicyResearch found that weekly benefits paid through the TDI programs average only $170 to $200 and that the duration of benefit claims ranged from five to 13 weeks.
The United States also stands out among industrialized countries for its paucityof public child care assistance. Unlike most of Europe, it has never embraced anational system for universal provision, funding, or regulation ofearly-childhood education and care. More than 40 percent of American childrenunder age five spend 35 hours or more per week in nonparental care, and another25 percent spend 15 to 35 hours.
Substitute care in this country is overwhelmingly private in both provision andfinancing. The U.S. government spends about $200 on direct child care assistanceper child under age 15--about one-tenth of the spending in Sweden and one-fifthof that in France. Assistance is provided through two primary mechanisms: (1)means-tested subsidies, available on a limited basis for low-income families withemployed parents, and (2) early-childhood education programs (mostly through themeans-tested Head Start program) and state prekindergarten programs. Children inthe United States now routinely start public school at a young age; aboutone-half of four-year-olds and 89 percent of five-year-olds are in (usually)part-day prekindergarten or kindergarten programs. But as few as 5 percent ofchildren age three and younger, and of older preschool children outsideprekindergarten and kindergarten, are in any form of publicly subsidized orprovided care.
Some observers justify miserly child care expenditures in the United States bypointing to tax benefits for families who use child care. The federal governmentand several state governments exempt a portion of child care expenses frompersonal income taxes. While the federal Child and Dependent Care Credit is nowused by a large number of families, low-income families with no tax liabilityreceive no benefits, and the actual benefit for others is low. As of themid-1990s, the federal tax credit expenditures totaled about $47 per child underthe age of 15.
Unfortunately, the United States gets what it pays for. Minimally regulatedprivate-child-care arrangements provide uneven and generally low-quality care. Aresearch team from the NationalInstitute of Child Health and Human Development recently estimated that only 11 percent of child care settings for children age three and younger meet standards for "excellent" care. In part, quality is poor because the care is provided by a minimally educated and inadequately trained work force. According to data collected by Marcy Whitebook of the Center for the Child Care Workforce, some 22 percent to 34 percent of teachers in regulated child care centers and family child care settings do not have a high school diploma; Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, reports that in unregulated family-and-relative child care settings, between 33 percent and 46 percent of caregivers have not completed high school.
Child care providers are a poorly educated work force in large part becausefamilies cannot afford to pay more highly trained professionals. Full-time childcare for a four-year-old averages between $3,500 and $6,000 per year--more thancollege tuition at many state universities. Yet despite this expense, child careworkers often earn poverty-level wages. Whitebook estimates that they earn anaverage of $6.12 per hour--slightly less than parking lot attendants andone-third the average salary of flight attendants.
Many of these poorly paid child care workers are women of color. And many areimmigrants from developing countries who are in search of better economicprospects--and who often leave the care of their own children to even poorerwomen in their home country. [See Arlie Russell Hochschild, "The Nanny Chain," TAP, January 3, 2000.]
A lthough the European welfare states couldteach the United States much about child care, they have not completely solvedthe dilemma of providing gender-egalitarian support for dual earner/dual carerfamilies. The supply of child care for children under age three is very limitedin many countries, and for older preschool children in some. Also, both short-and longer-term leaves are still used overwhelmingly by mothers. A fullyegalitarian package of family support policies is not completely realized even inthe progressive Scandinavian countries, but there at least the framework for suchpolicies is in place.
Learning across borders may have considerable cachet in contemporary policydebates, but drawing lessons from the European welfare states has fallen out offavor. Resistance to lessons from overseas has been fueled by vivid press reportsof the collapse of the European welfare states. American reporters, particularlyin the mainstream print and financial media, have been preoccupied in recentyears with the death of the European welfare state. In 1992 the Los AngelesTimes noted that "Britain ... finished dismantling much of its welfare system in the 1980s under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher." The San FranciscoChronicle reported in 1993 that "nowhere is the dismantling of the social security net more drastic than in Sweden, ... [though] similar retreats from the expansive days of social democracy are under way in virtually every European Community nation." And in 1995 BusinessWeek reported that "France ... in recent weeks has been at the center of what may well be the last great Continental convulsion in this century: the dismantling of the European welfare state."
The Popular Welfare State
As Mark Twain is said to have observed about premature rumors of his demise,reports of the death of the European welfare state turn out to be greatlyexaggerated. Spending trends in Europe suggest that while some countries havetaken steps to curtail certain areas of program growth, overall social spendingcontinued to rise throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Growth in expenditure wasparticularly steep in programs that support families and children. Between 1980and the mid-1990s, per-child spending on family policy in the Western Europeancountries increased by 52 percent. Within the arena of family policy, the growthin expenditures on maternity and parental leaves was quite high: Across WesternEurope, average spending per employed woman doubled during this period.
Rising investments indicate that political support for family policies isstrong in the European countries--a finding that is confirmed by public opinionresearch. Family policies are popular mostly because they are universallyavailable. Family leave and child care have been institutionalized asmiddle-class benefits that support new parents, relieve parents of the financialburden of private child care, and provide high-quality early education forchildren--all without stigmatizing or isolating recipients. The public sees theseprograms as providing broader social benefits as well. Cross-national policyresearch has linked generous leave and child care benefits in Europe to muchlower child poverty rates than in the United States, and to less disruption inemployment among mothers with young children.
Steadily growing investments in family policies suggest that the Europeanwelfare states remain committed to supporting dual earner/dual carer families.Translating these policies to the U.S. context remains challenging. One obviousconcern is expense. One way to approach the question of cost is through a thoughtexperiment: What if the United States were to commit the same share of its GDP tofamily policy as the Europeans do? This country currently spends about 0.2percent of its GDP on child care and a negligible amount on leave. In contrast,France spends about 1.4 percent of its GDP on a generous policy package of familyleave and early-childhood education and care. If the same spending share wereapplied to the U.S. GDP, we'd be looking at about $100 billion annually. As ofthe mid-1990s, U.S. expenditures on early-childhood education and care totaledonly about $15 billion. Thus, in order to provide a package of leave and childcare benefits similar to the one available to French families, we would need anadditional $85 billion per year.
This figure very likely represents a high-end estimate. The actual bill wouldprobably be lower than these figures suggest since children generally startschool at a younger age in the United States than in France. It would also belower if financing similar benefits consumed a smaller share of the GDP in thestrong U.S. economy. Costs would be lower still if policies were partiallymeans-tested or taxed for higher-income families. And recent research suggeststhat some of those expenditures would be recouped by productivity gainsassociated with lower employee turnover, fewer work absences, and a lessstressed-out work force.
Nevertheless, it is clear that comprehensive family policies would requiresubstantial new investments in the United States. Whether these investments areaffordable is a relative question. It is easy to find examples of spending thatmight be used to offset new investments in family policy. According to the Center for Popular Economics, federal aid to U.S. corporations amounts to $75 billion to $200 billion a year. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb and the Centerfor Defense Information (founded by retired generals and admirals) have argued that the U.S. military budget could be cut by more than $150 billion a year without sacrificing high levels of military readiness. The United States could also find family policy revenues closer to home, by capping a variety of federal tax benefits that primarily reach our most affluent citizens. The mortgage interest deduction alone costs nearly $60 billion a year, local property tax deductions for homeowners cost $14 billion, and the exclusion of capital gains on inherited property costs $25 billion. [See Nancy Folbre's article "
Leave No Child Behind?
" on page 20.]
Providing real support for America's working families would require an exerciseof collective political will. Fortunately, there are some hopeful signs. As moreand more families find themselves squeezed for time between the demands of theworkplace and the home, support for more expansive family policies may begrowing, especially as parents find their budgets squeezed by the price of evenmediocre child care. A recent survey conducted for the think tank Zero To Three found that four in five adults support "paid parental leave that allows working parents of very young babies to stay home from work to care for their children." Policy officials are taking at least tentative steps in the direction of policy expansion. Forty-two states now have some form of prekindergarten services. In June 2000, the U.S. Department of Labor issued regulations that allow states to extend unemployment insurance to mothers out of work owing to childbirth. By cross-national standards, these developments are meager. But they may signal a welcome shift in the United States from rhetoric to action in the valuing of children, families, and equal opportunities for women.
For more information: http://www.childpolicyintl.org/
